Thursday, August 14, 2008

Wordpress, new and od Blogger templates have a default ‘NOFOLLOW’ attribute on their comments. This is done to stop spammers from abusing your blog. Having a ‘NOFOLLOW’ attribute on your comment means that search engines will not follow any links created on your comments.Since links are important in Search Engine Optimization, many bloggers spend a lot of time visiting other blogs to leave comments on them and create a link back to their own blog. If however, a blog has a NOFOLLOW attribute to the link on its comment, the links that are created will be useless to those who have created it.

If you are new to blogging and you would like to encourage more participation from your reader and build a community of your own, you can disable your NOFOLLOW attribute to give an incentive to your readers to react and leave comments on your post. This is also a good way to increase traffic and attract more visitors to your blog. Here are some more reasons why removing the NOFOLLOW attribute is worthwhile:

Increase the number of comments on your posts.

Encourage repeat visits and comments (increase in traffic).

A DoFollow link is a way to thank people who take the time to comment on your blog. (Link Love and Increase in Technorati Blog Reaction)

Being generous can give you alot of benefits - more friends, more readers etc.

Wordpress Blog

For wordpress users you can download a plugin to automate the process. It will disable the automatic rel="nofollow" attributes added to external links. You may want to do this if you have good spam filtering for your comments, or if your blog is moderated.

Optionally you can also set a comment age limit for adding the attributes, or have them removed differently from comments left by registered users and other visitors.

Pingbacks and trackbacks are just different types of comments in WordPress. This plugin will take care of all of them. You can also choose not to remove rel="nofollow" from some types of comments.